His autodidacticism precipitated a religious crisis. At Harrow he had attended daily prayers and Sunday services; in the army he participated in church parades. Until now he had never doubted their value. The anticipation of a hereafter, he had assumed, justifiably disciplined the lower classes and served as an incentive for middle-class morality. Indian sects were similarly useful, provided they did not degenerate into fanaticism. But the books he was now reading challenged the underpinning of everything he had learned since childhood. Gibbon, Reade, and Lecky convinced him that he had been gulled, and as a consequence he “passed through a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase which, had it lasted, might have made me a nuisance.” This, of course, is a common experience among the self-educated. But Churchill’s resolution of it was unusual. In moments of danger in Cuba and later, he instinctively recited prayers he had learned at Woom’s knee. He survived. He asked for lesser gifts, “and nearly always in these years, and indeed throughout my life, I got what I wanted. This practice seemed perfectly natural, and just as real as the reasoning process which contradicted it so sharply.” In a book of quotations he had read: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” Why, he asked himself, should he discard the reasons of the heart for those of the head? Why not enjoy both? He therefore adopted “quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.”41
“I have hardly looked at a novel,” he wrote on March 31, 1897. He was sticking to tough reading and writing letters meshed with abstruse allusions. His brother officers wondered how he did it. The climate was punishing. This was the Raj in its heroic period, without air conditioning, refrigerators, or even electric fans. One thinks of Kipling in the Punjab only a few years earlier, sweating and scribbling under the same sun through long afternoons in his darkened bungalow, struggling to immortalize the age. Churchill was writing, too, but his was a genius of a different order, and he had not found his medium. He was writing his first book, and only novel, Savrola, though he had not yet settled on that title. Once it had begun to take shape he wrote Jennie: “I think you will be surprised when you get the MS. It is far and away the best thing that I have ever done. I have only written 80 MS pages—but I find a fertility of ideas that surprises me…. It is called ‘Affairs of State,’ a political romance. Scene Plot a hypothetical Republic…. I am quite enthusiastic about it. All my philosophy is put into the mouth of the hero. But you must see for yourself. It is full of adventure.”42
He added a postscript: “Do try to get me up to the war if you can possibly.” He meant the imminent clashes along India’s North-West Frontier, but it is clear from his correspondence that year that the prospect of fighting anywhere would have been welcome. The first flush of his enthusiasm for Bangalore had faded. He had become restless; his temperament cried for action. India had become “an abominable country to live long in. Comfort you get—company you miss…. There is every temptation to relapse into a purely animal state of existence.” He and Baring had spent Christmas in Bengal, but he had concluded that “Calcutta is full of supremely uninteresting people endeavouring to assume an air of heartiness”; he was glad to have seen it only because “it will be unnecessary ever to see it again.” Yearning for a stimulating environment, he wrote that if he could “only get hold of the right people my stay here might be of value. If I had come to India as an MP—however young & foolish, I could have had access to all who know and can convey. As a soldier… I vegetate.” Without his books, he felt, he would stagnate. “The Indian press is despicable—being chiefly advertisements.” All sorts of complaints crowded his letters now. “My face is blistered by the sun so badly that I have had to see a doctor,” he wrote after one field exercise, and when he was appointed acting adjutant he had to write “so many memos etc that to touch a pen is an effort.”43
His first chance to break free from this oppression came in the spring of 1897. The Greeks had sent a small expeditionary force to fight rebellious Turks on Crete. The British Mediterranean fleet, joining those of five other nations, was blockading the island to prevent the landing of Greek reinforcements. Churchill was indignant: “What an atrocious crime the Government have committed in Crete! That British warships should lead the way in protecting the blood bespattered Turkish soldiery from the struggles of their victims is horrible to contemplate.” His mother disagreed: “The Concert of Europe were obliged to act as they did altho’ they certainly were slow in making up their minds.” He was unconvinced: “We are doing a very wicked thing in firing on the Cretan insurgents… so that she [Greece] cannot succour them.” He saw the whole thing as a devious Salisbury plot to strengthen the Turks and thereby deny Constantinople to the Russians. He was right there, but wrong in an aside which, in the light of subsequent events, has a haunting ring: Salisbury’s policy was “foolish because, as surely as night follows day—the Russians are bound to get Constantinople. We could never stop them even if we wished. Nor ought we to wish for anything that could impede the expulsion from Europe of the filthy Oriental.”44
All this laid the groundwork for his letter to Jennie of April 21. “I am afraid you will regard this letter somewhat in the aspect of a bombshell,” he began. He proposed to cover the Cretan fighting as a war correspondent, and he didn’t care which side accepted his credentials. “Of course all my sympathies are entirely with the Greeks, but on the other hand the Turks are bound to win—are in enormous strength & will be on the offensive the whole time.” It didn’t matter, really; “if you can get me good letters to the Turks—to the Turks I will go. If to the Greeks—to the Greeks.” He thought her close friend Sir Edgar Vincent “could probably do everything for me in Constantinople & could get me attached to some general’s staff etc as in Cuba. On the other hand you know the King of Greece and could of course arrange matters in that quarter.” Jennie, he was confident, could also find a newspaper which would hire him. He expected to be paid ten or fifteen pounds for each piece but would meet his own expenses, and he asked her to manage a loan—“Lord Rothschild would be the person to arrange this for me as he knows every one.” His mother, he felt certain, would “not stand in my way in this matter but will facilitate my going just as you did in the case of Cuba.” He misjudged her. In London she described his design to friends as “a wild scheme” and told Jack that the men she knew in the Foreign Office thought the war would end soon anyhow. This being true, his plan, far from being a bombshell, would end rather “like a damp firework,” which is precisely what happened.45
He had been checked. But not mated. Considering the powerful men who had been enticed by his mother’s beauty—the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, Salisbury, Vincent, Sir Evelyn Wood, Kitchener, Lord Cromer, Sir Bindon Blood—Winston concluded that she could surely exploit at least one of her relationships to his advantage. He had no compunctions about twisting her arm, thereby persuading her to twist theirs. But he could not do it from six thousand miles away. Luckily he would soon be at her side. As the hot season of 1897 approached, the officers of the Fourth Hussars were offered what was called “three months’ accumulated privilege leave” in England. Most declined on the ground that they had just settled in, but “I,” Churchill would recall, “thought it was a pity that such good things should go a-begging, and I therefore volunteered to fill the gap.” On May 8 he sailed from Bombay aboard the Ganges. The trip was an ordeal: “sweltering heat, rough weather and fearful seasickness.” At Aden he was greeted by bitter news. The Greeks had sued for peace. His disappointment was shared by a fellow passenger, Colonel Ian Hamilton, a romantic who dreamed of Greece’s past glories and would later encounter Churchill again and yet again, but Winston, unconsoled, left the ship when it reached Naples, dawdled in Pompeii, Rome, and Paris, and reached home only just in time to attend society’s annual fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House in Piccadilly. Jennie went as Theodora. Of Winston we know only that he wore a
sword. He had, he said, returned to enjoy “the gaieties of the London Season,” but he had other matters on his mind.46 War, any war, was one. Politics was another. After the ball he dropped into the St. Stephen’s Chambers office of Fitzroy Stewart, secretary of the Conservative Central Office and a distant cousin, and told him he wanted to stand for Parliament as a Conservative.
No seats were vacant, Stewart explained, but he wrote Henry Skrine, the party’s agent in Bath, asking: “Will you allow the late Lord Randolph Churchill’s son, Mr Winston S. Churchill… to speak at your gathering on the 26th? He is very keen about politics and about the Primrose League and has told us he would like to address a few political meetings before rejoining his regiment…. He is a clever young man and his presence would no doubt be of some interest to the Bath Conservatives.” Thus it was that Churchill delivered his first political address at Claverton Manor, now England’s American Museum, in a park near Bath, in the high summer of 1897. Newspapers then devoted roughly the same space to politics that they give to sports today, and both the Bath Daily Chronicle and London’s Morning Post ran full accounts of his performance. The speech was enthusiastically received—he was interrupted by cheers forty-one times—but that may have arisen in part from sympathy for his inexperience; he began by telling his audience that the timeworn “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking” should be pardoned in this instance, because this was, in fact, his maiden effort.47
Not much was happening in politics just now, he said, which was dull for the politicians but probably a relief to the people. Then he launched into a spirited defense of the Conservative party and an attack on its critics. Liberals were “always liberal with other people’s money.” Radicals—“the dried-up drain-pipe of Radicalism”—reminded him of “the man who, on being told that ventilation was an excellent thing, went and smashed every window in his house, and died of rheumatic fever.” Conservative policy, on the other hand, was “a look-before-you-leap policy… a policy of don’t leap at all if there is a ladder.” He praised the Tories’ bill to compensate workers injured in industrial accidents, regretted a recent strike, and took the position, always popular with politicians courting the average voter, of damning both labor and capital. Ultimately, he believed, “the labourer will become, as it were, a shareholder in the business in which he works,” though he hastily added that this solution would become practical only “in the distant future.” The greatest achievement of the Conservatives, he said, had been teaching “the people of Great Britain the splendour of their Empire, the nature of their Constitution, and the importance of their fleet.” This was the heart of his message, a paean to imperialism, and his peroration, throbbing with the rhythms of Gibbon, is both a tribute to his imperial faith and a demonstration of his beginning struggle toward eloquence:
There are not wanting those who say that in this Jubilee year our Empire has reached the height of its glory and power, and that we now should begin to decline, as Babylon, Carthage, and Rome declined. Do not believe these croakers, but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by our actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen, that our flag shall fly high upon the sea, our voice be heard in the councils of Europe, our Sovereign supported by the love of her subjects, then shall we continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilisation, and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth.48
On the day that Churchill spoke in Bath, news reached England of a Pathan uprising in the Swat Valley, on India’s North-West Frontier. This had been smoldering for some time, and was a direct consequence of Whitehall’s policy in that harsh, craggy corner of Asia. The British, having conquered the plains of India, had paused at the foothills of the Himalayas and turned back to develop the lands they had taken. The mountains formed a natural barrier as definite, and as unbridgeable, as the English Channel. But in the northwest the peaks trailed off. There, in 1893, an Anglo-Afghan frontier had been demarcated; Britain intended to build Afghanistan up as a buffer between the Raj and the Russians, Asia’s other great power. Meanwhile, they went about enrolling the tribesmen on their side of the frontier as subjects of the Queen. And there lay the rub. These clansmen—Pathans, Swatis, Waziris, Mahsuds, Afridis, Bunerwalis, Chitralis, and Gilgitis—had lived in remote independence since the dawn of time. Now bands of pale aliens were moving among them, building roads, putting up signs, establishing outposts and blockhouses. They were bewildered, then angry. They knew almost nothing of what was happening in the rest of the world, but now they were being informed, and misinformed, by a Moslem rabble-rouser whom the British called the Mad Fakir and Churchill later described as “a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness.”49 This mullah told the tribesmen of victories by their fellow Moslems—the Turks on Crete and the Mahdi in the Sudan—and spread wild tales. Turks had captured the Suez Canal, he said, explaining what it was, and he assured them that the British bullets could not harm men faithful to Mohammed, displaying as proof a small bruise on his leg which, he said, was the only consequence of a direct hit by an English cannonball. The viceregal staff in Calcutta was not unaware of this agitation. Word of it came to them through networks of—readers of Kim will have guessed—informers. Punitive expeditions were organized; reinforcements of Tommies were on their way from other parts of the Empire. London was particularly worried by the isolation of the Raj’s key frontier fort, Chitral, far to the north, a miniature Gibraltar situated on an eminence commanding the great passes into Afghanistan. A Swati revolt threatened the British garrison holding the Malakand Pass and, specifically, a long wire-rope jhula, or swinging bridge, needed to provision Chitral. Whitehall reacted by announcing that a field force of three brigades would put down the uprising. It would be led by General Sir Bindon Blood.
Churchill was standing on the lawn at the Goodwood races, enjoying balmy weather and winning money, when the report of this decision buzzed through the crowd. He was electrified. On meeting Sir Bindon at Deepdene the year before he had extracted a promise that, should the general take the field again, Winston would join him. Churchill had three weeks of leave left, but he instantly wired Blood, reminding him of his pledge, and caught the next boat to India, the S.S. Rome, leaving behind, in his haste, a batch of new books, his polo sticks, his pet dog Peas, a Primrose League badge old Mr. Skrine had lent him in Bath, and, of course, a sheaf of bills. At each port of call he looked, in vain, for a reply from Blood. This P & O voyage was even worse than the last, particularly on the Red Sea: “The temperature is something like over 100° and as it is damp heat—it is equal to a great deal more…. It is like being in a vapour bath. The whole sea is steamy and there is not a breath of air—by night or day.” Finally, at Bombay, a telegram from Upper Swat awaited him: “Very difficult. No vacancies. Come as correspondent. Will try to fit you in. B.B.”50
A four-day detour to Bangalore was necessary; he needed his colonel’s permission to join Blood. Newspaper credentials came next. Jennie tried The Times, without success, but the Daily Telegraph contracted to pay Winston five pounds a column, and in India the Allahabad Pioneer, which had published much of Kipling’s early work, agreed to run a three-hundred-word telegram from him every day and pay accordingly. At the Bangalore train station he pushed a small sack of rupees across the counter and asked, out of curiosity, how far north his journey would take him. The ticket babu checked a timetable and told him 2,028 miles—a five-day trip through the worst of the summer heat. But there were compensations. He had bought a bag of books, and the first-class, leather-lined, heavily shuttered railway compartment carried a circular wheel of wet straw which the passenger could turn from time to time. Thus, he proceeded, as he put it, “in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare.”51 He broke his trip at Rawalpindi to visit a friend in the Fourth Dragoon Guards. The dra
goons were preparing to be sent to the front; officers expected the order to grind their swords any day. That evening he joined a sing-along in the sergeants’ mess. Long afterward he would remember roaring out:
And England asks the question
When danger’s nigh
Will the sons of India do or die?
And:
Great White Mother, far across the sea,
Ruler of the Empire may she ever be.
Long may she reign, glorious and free,
In the Great White Motherland!
A photograph of Churchill taken at the time shows him faultlessly turned out in the romantic uniform of that period: spurred cavalry boots, whipcord jodhpurs, and military tunic with choker collar, Sam Browne belt, and the swooping khaki topee which will forever be identified with Victorian colonial wars. Wearing it, with a Wolseley valise for paper and pencils slung over his shoulder, he stood on the platform at Nowshera, the railhead of Blood’s Malakand Field Force, and arranged for transportation for the last leg of his journey: forty miles across a scorching plain and then up the steep, winding ascent to Malakand Pass, the general’s headquarters. Upon arrival Winston learned that Blood himself was off with a flying column, putting down a local mutiny by the Bunerwal tribe. Yellow with dust, Churchill was provided with a tent, a place in the staff mess, and a tumbler of whiskey. He took this last only to be polite. He had long enjoyed the taste of wine and brandy, but until this moment the smoky taste of whiskey had turned his stomach. Here, however, he faced a choice of tepid water, tepid water with lime juice, and tepid water with whiskey. As he put it, he “grasped the larger hope.” In the five days Blood was away he conquered his aversion. “Nor was this a momentary acquirement,” he later wrote. “Once one got the knack of it, the very repulsion of the flavour developed an attraction of its own…. I have never shrunk when occasion warranted it from the main basic refreshment of the white officer in the East.” Thus fortified, he contemplated his immediate future. He cherished few illusions about warfare; he had, after all, come under fire in Cuba. Aboard the train to Nowshera he had warned his mother that danger lay ahead for him. Nevertheless, “I view every possibility with composure. It might not have been worth my while, who am really no soldier, to risk so many fair chances on a war which can only help me directly in a profession I mean to discard.” That, at least, was settled. “But I have considered everything and I feel that the fact of having seen service with British troops while still a young man must give me more weight politically—must add to my claims to be listened to and may perhaps improve my prospects of gaining popularity with the country.” Now he wrote her again, more somberly: “By the time this reaches you everything will be over so that I do not mind writing about it. I have faith in my star—that is that I am intended to do something in the world. If I am mistaken—what does it matter? My life has been a pleasant one and though I should regret to leave it—it would be a regret that perhaps I should never know.”52